A little about our life, our business and our pets. www.greytinspirations.com

Safety warnings and cloning

We send out warm thoughts to everyone affected by ice and snow today! I know there are power outages all over the northeast. We hope that your power will be back on soon and that you have some back-up ways to keep warm for both you and your animals.

Here where I live it’s, yes, raining again. There’s a new lake in the field across the street from my house. The dogs don’t even think about going out much anymore. They just run and wrestle and play in the house now.

There are a couple of things in the news besides the weather that you should know about. Just forget about giving your dog products with peanuts for a while. Many peanut butter treats for dogs are being recalled due to concerns about salmonella. The FDA and the CDC have narrowed the problem to a plant in Blakely, Georgia. The Peanut Corporation of America apparently shipped peanut products even after finding salmonella in internal testing at the plant last year. Many people have become sick from products containing peanuts since then and eight people have died in the U.S. and Canada.

Three companies are recalling peanut butter dog treats at this time:

The recalled products include only the following types of Carolina Prime Pet treats in single unit packages with lot date codes between 081508 and 010909:

There is no way to know if other dog treats containing peanut butter will also be recalled but I would play it safe and avoid giving peanut butter treats to your dogs for now.

Back to cold weather for a moment, if you live in an area that has frozen water, please take care with your dog, especially when you let them off leash. Frozen water that covers lakes, creeks, rivers and ponds is not a good place for dogs to play. Dogs cannot tell whether ice may crack or not.

One person reports that a training client was killed last week. The owner was walking along a deep creek and her dog went under the ice. In this case the dog went through the ice, the owner went through and then a friend managed to get them both out by breaking a path in the ice out to them. When they were running back to the car, the dog unfortunately went out on the ice yet again. That time the dog couldn’t be saved. So please be very careful if you live in areas with frozen water. Don’t let your dog loose where he or she could go under ice. Even if you are nearby you may not be able to pull your dog out.

The Otto family in Boca Raton, Florida, froze their dog Lancelot’s DNA six years ago. Now cloning technology has advanced enough that a company in South Korea was able to recreate their beloved pet.

“The only sad thing about dogs is that they have such a short life, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could live your life with the same dog,” said Nina Otto, Lancy’s owner…

“It truthfully is amazing to me that this process has come to be and that I am getting, if not my dog, certainly the essence of Lancelot and it looks so much like him that, well… He’s a clone, so he should look like him,” said Otto. “Lancy was the first dog, commercially that they did clone because his DNA was frozen and very viable.”

According to Bioarts International CEO Lou Hawthorne, head of the firm that cloned Lancelot, cloning dogs is even harder than cloning humans.

The original Lancelot was a Labrador who died last year on New Year’s Eve. He was 11 years old.

“Lancelot was very human and he… He just… We used to call him our prince charming, ” said Otto.

You can have your dog cloned, too, but it will cost you. The price for cloning Lancelot was over $150,000.

“It cost over 150-thousand dollars, so it was a lot of money. So, as I said before I did sell something that was precious to me to get something that was even more precious to me,” said Otto.

Nina Otto sold some big time jewelry to finance what she describes as the future.

“Yes, it’s expensive now, but as we know with everything, once it becomes college knowledge, it loses its value and it will become less expensive, ” said Otto…

[I]n a dim economic climate why would someone spend six figures on a dog.

“It was last May. I probably, at this point and time I would’ve said, you know, we really shouldn’t do it, it’s just economically not a good idea, but it was done, so thank god and thank god… The money is gone and he’s here and that’s what’s more important to me,” said Otto.

So, the Otto family have their Lancelot, or at least a dog with Lancelot’s genes. He won’t be exactly the same. He’ll sort of be like an identical twin to their original Lancelot, genetically speaking.

Cloning of all kinds is still very controversial, including cloning pets. Most people I know don’t like the idea. Personally, dog cloning doesn’t bother me. It’s a very difficult process and I don’t think it’s ever going to be commonplace. But there have been some good uses for dog cloning so far. This same company in South Korea has cloned a world class sniffer dog used to detect bombs and explosives in airports. The puppies from that litter had a far greater chance of becoming sniffer dogs themselves — which are very much in demand for security work. Cloning dogs who do very specialized work can save a lot of time, work and money in trying to test and train young dogs to see if they have the same abilities.

However, many people have ethical concerns about cloning dogs. Still, if I’d had a chance to clone my most beloved dog ever, I think I would have done it without hesitation just to have a dog like her back in my life again. If I had $150,000, of course. 🙂